Marketing Research & Analytics
Without market research, it is unlikely that your business will be successful. Researching and gathering information on your target market helps you to better understand your customers, their needs, your competitors, and your business.
A comprehensive view and analysis of your consumers help you innovate and increase your conversions. Understanding your business and its positioning in your niche and industry enables you to expand and increase your ROI. Knowing your competitors empowers you to position your company more strategically to stand out.
Market research is vital for every business, whether they are an SME or an enterprise.
Hire PWD today to help you understand your business, your target audience, and your competition.
Why Market Research Is Critical to Staying Competitive
Learning why market research is critical for your success helps you understand why you should invest in it.
Here are the top 7 reasons you should various types of market research into your industry, consumers, target market, and competitors:
Ensure You Have Consumers
The first reason to conduct market research is to ensure you have potential customers who are interested in what you have to sell. No customers = no sales = no business.
As such, undertaking exploratory research gives you insight into whether or not you have a potential audience.
Understand Your Customers
Once you know you have a target audience, you need to understand who they are. Besides demographic data (like age, gender, etc.) you also need information on their pain points. This will help you to strategize how to market or product or services in a way that solves these pain points.
Knowing how often your customers will buy from you, as well as their expectations of your products and services is key to success. Not only will this help you retain existing customers, but it will also help you find new customers.
Know How to Sell to Your Target Market
In their first year, 20% of new businesses fail, and 50% fail by year five. Knowing how you need to sell your products or services to your customers is a priority. It is also part of your recipe for success. After all, customers buying from you means more profit.
How people buy changes over time. As such, you need to adapt your strategies to fit these new buying trends. Undertaking marketing research can help you identify trends and better understand where and how your customers are buying.
Get to Know the Competition
Critical for any business is knowing who they are competing against. A direct or indirect competitor may threaten your business’s very existence if you don’t know how to stand out and maintain your competitive advantage.
Doing marketing research identifies which businesses might be a threat. Use this information to deep dive into your competition. Examine what they are doing well so you can do better. Gather information and analyse their weak spots so you can beat them!
Scale Your Company
Every company needs growth to remain successful. Businesses can more easily scale when they understand their industry and the opportunities available for growth.
Having market research results at your fingertips also lets you know when is the ideal time to scale so you can avoid pitfalls - saving your money and time.
Lower Your Business Risk
Undertaking research and analytics into your industry helps you decrease your business risk so that you can maximise your success. For example, through data collection via surveys and focus groups, you can find out why the number of recurring customers has dropped. Knowing the why means you can put an action plan in place to boost your leads and customers. The more you know, the better your decision making!
Another example of how market research can help lower risk is that you can test a new product or service before you launch it. By testing your new product ideas and services on your target consumer, you can better understand whether it will succeed or be a flop.
For example, you can conduct a focus group in which you interview customers who have tested your product. This type of qualitative research enables you to gain insights into any potential and existing problem areas. The focus group can provide feedback on why they liked or didn't like your product so that you can improve it and make sure you produce something that your ideal target customer would actually buy.
Build a Future-Proof Business
Companies need to stay relevant. Thus, they need to be flexible and adapt to demand.
It is much easier to work on staying relevant now and keeping and continually growing your customer base. You wouldn’t want to start from scratch, or lose your customers and then get back in the game. Research and insight help you predict the market better. This leads to better business planning and action!
The Primary Google Analytics Metrics to Be Concerned With
Having a website is a must in the digital world we live in today. A website helps you increase your brand exposure, as well as connect and engage with your target audience. You can also more easily tailor your marketing campaigns to increase your conversions.
Using Google Analytics for web traffic research helps you meet your business goals and conduct market research. Here are the primary metrics you should look at:
Page Views
Page views measure the total number of all the pages that have been viewed on your website. Included in this metric is the repeated views of a single page.
Why are page views important? It may show you which web pages are the most popular. Or, it could mean your visitors are landing on this page but can’t find what they’re looking for. As such, this metric is best understood in combination with a few others to give you context.
Average Time on Page
The average time spent on a web page gives you an indication of your users’ experiences. Furthermore, it helps you gauge your marketing efforts at targeting relevant customers.
The more time a visitor spends on a page, the more they are engaging with your content. As such, a high average time on your page and low bounce rate may indicate that your website visitors like to explore your website.
Goal Conversion Rate
When you define a target objective, you want visitors to undertake specific interactions. These are goals. Examples of goals could be a visitor signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase, downloading a lead magnet, or visiting a certain number of web pages.
You can determine the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by measuring the conversion rates over time. Other metrics can also be used together with the goal conversion rate to identify what else leads to a successful conversion rate.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who visit only a single web page on your site before leaving. They do not interact with your content.
In general, a high bounce rate may indicate that there is a technical problem. Your content doesn’t meet the needs of your visitor, or there are no calls-to-action (CTAs).
If you find that your pages have a high bounce rate but aren't sure what you're doing wrong, be sure to get in touch with us at PWD. We can help you understand these metrics and analyse your pages to ensure high engagement and conversions.
How User Behaviour Data Can Help You Optimise Your Website
Understanding your user data by looking at the metrics in Google Analytics can help you optimise your website for both your industry and your target customers:
Optimise for Your Industry
Market research helps you learn more about your competitors. With the insights you learn, you can reverse-engineer what they have optimised to see their strategy for ranking on search engines. Examine how useful, valuable, and engaging their content is compared to that on your site.
Your competitors also teach you about best practices for your industry so you can optimise your website accordingly. For example, case studies, an informative About Us page, and customer testimonials may further establish your brand as an authority in your industry. This may also be information your ideal consumer is looking for to determine whether your brand is trustworthy.
Armed with this knowledge, you can better optimise your website for your industry.
Optimise for Your Target Audience
Use the user behaviour data you obtain from web traffic analytics to optimise your website specifically for your users.
If you have a high bounce rate and the average time on your web pages is low, revise those pages. Produce engaging, high-converting content with internal links and CTAs. Ensure your web pages are created with user intention and expectation in mind. You also need to follow website and Google search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices. This will help establish your website as an authority that your customers want to visit.
PWD can help you with your SEO strategy and market research so your website is optimised to benefit your customers and your business! Contact us today to boost your online success!
Google Analytics: It’s Free
The basic freemium version of Google Analytics is all your business needs. Since it’s free, you can do the market research yourself, right?
The short answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean it is the easy answer. A professional market research agency, like PWD, are the experts for a reason. With our Research and Analytics services, you will be better equipped to find your target consumers online and fully understand how to meet their needs better than your competition.
Hiring our agency also means you have more time to focus on your company and meeting your goals. So contact us today to find out how we can help you optimise your business so that you can maximise your profits!
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of hiring a market research agency?
While you can surely do market research yourself or keep it in-house, there are four main benefits to hiring market research consultants like PWD:
- Consultants are professional information gatherers. They know exactly what information you need to stay competitive and relevant.
- A market research agency has access to technology, tools, and software. They use these to obtain useful industry information that you would otherwise not be able to access.
- With so much data gathering experience, they know exactly where and how to get the data you need. No wasting time.
- An agency can also help you tailor your inbound marketing strategy and sales tactics to achieve more results.
What are the popular instruments for doing market research?
There are many tools you can use to conduct your market research. For primary research, you’d most likely use interviews (face-to-face or online), questionnaires, and surveys. You can also use focus groups and case studies.
For your business website, you’d need to look to tools such as Google Analytics to help you. Web traffic research tells you a lot about your potential and existing customers. Use this research and analytics to increase your conversion rate by understanding user behaviour.
PWD is a web analytics research and market research agency. We can help you conduct marketing research to scale your business and better engage with your audience.
Is Google Analytics a marketing tool?
Yes, you can use Google Analytics as a marketing tool. Examine Google Analytics data to gain insights into how visitors and customers use your website. This information can be beneficial when you devise your business development and marketing strategies.
Hiring PWD helps you scale your business and understand user behaviour so you can capitalise on it. You will also improve your conversion rate and rake in more profit. Contact PWD today, and do market research to future-proof your business!